By WILLIAM ARNOLD, P-I MOVIE CRITIC

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, April 19, 2007

The Danish film, "After the Wedding" -- the last (and to my mind best) of the five 2006 foreign-language film Oscar nominees to play Seattle -- is a highly original and unusually powerful drama that deserves comparison to the great Scandinavian films of the past.

It's also one of those movies that plays a lot better when you go into it cold, with no advance knowledge of its premise or characters, and just allow it to carry through its series of unexpected twists to a destination you don't expect.

But if you must know, it's the story of Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen), a 40-something Danish man who's settled down to a simple, selfless life as a worker in a poor Bombay orphanage, where he's devoted to the children and serves as a surrogate father.

One day, he's forced -- against his will -- to go back to Denmark to meet with a billionaire contributor, a man who's considering a sizable donation to the orphanage but, as a condition of the bequest, insists on a personal meeting with Jacob.

When he gets to Copenhagen, the meeting with the donor, Jorgen (Rolf Lassgard), goes well, so well in fact that he invites Jacob to come to his daughter's wedding -- a gala event that's being held the next day at his country estate.

There, Jacob discovers that the man's wife is a former lover he hasn't seen in 20 years and the daughter being married off (Stine Fischer Christensen) may be his own. Moreover, the benefactor knows this and has manipulated Jacob's presence at this crucial family moment.

Granted, this premise sounds like a gimmick, and a soap-operatic one at that, but writer-director Susanne Bier turns it into something special and profound, both an astute character study of its four principals and a unique drama of a family in crisis.

Basically, the film tells us that even the closest and most functional of families tend to be laced together by a web of secrets and, like a drama by O'Neill, Ibsen or Chekhov, the film's scenes progressively strip away those secrets.

But when the lies, half-truths and deceits are pushed aside in this particular extended family, what is revealed is not emptiness and self-interest but a marvelous core of strength and a nobility of spirit that makes you proud to be human.

Emotionally, this journey is immensely moving (you'll think about this movie for days after seeing it) and dramatically it's enormously satisfying. At the same time, there's not a contrived or gratuitously phony moment along the way.

Beyond this, every scene is kissed with irony, the characters all seem believably flawed, the narrative unfolds with just the right storytelling panache and everything else about the production seems right in a way that marks director Bier as a master filmmaker on the rise.